Open Cultuur Data: Opening up Cultural data in the Netherlands

Last week, the third and last blog post by the Dutch initiative ‘Open Cultuur Data’ has been published on the openGLAM blog. Open Cultuur Data (Open Cultural Data) is a network of cultural professionals, developers, designers, copyright specialists and open data experts, that opens cultural data and encourages the development of valuable cultural applications. This makes culture accessible in new ways to a broader public. In three posts, the people behind the project explain how the initiative was born, their experiences so far, and which lessons for the future they have learned.

Just as the Open GLAM initiative, Open Cultuur Data responds to the fact that more and more cultural institutions make their cultural data digitally accessible. This creates many new opportunities – for the institutions themselves but also for third parties – to use this information to create new applications and websites, allowing us to participate in arts and culture in new ways. However, this data is often very difficult to access for others. End users are often limited to (re-)use the data and often the data is technically badly approachable. Institutions sometimes manage data of which they don’t know the full potential and (social) value of.

The project wants to bring end users and institutions together and inform them. To do this the project promotes dialogue and the sharing of experiences on how to get more cultural data openly available. In this context they have organised a masterclass for cultural institutions and a series of hackathons. Furthermore, it is participating in the ePSI platform on open data and in the OKfestival heritage strand. The next step is to cross the borders and let Europe learn from the experiences of the initiative, also on a policy level.